The president has been invited to a man-to-man talk
Recently the opposition MPs expressed their willingness to talk to the president “not as politicians but as… men.” Vice-speaker Mykola Tomenko announced from the parliament rostrum that the members of the fraction “BYuT-Batkivshchyna” want to meet Viktor Yanukovych to discuss the realization of the PACE resolution. “I am sure that the president does not know the real situation in the country and what his team is doing, that is why I think that such conversation will be useful not only for Ukraine but for him as well.”
However, it turned out that the opposition had a lot of other questions to ask Yanukovych. Arsenii Yatseniuk voiced them after the break.
“The Friday agenda of the Verkhovna Rada has the bill on privatization of the Ukrainian gas-transport system. That is why we also want the president to say what they are negotiating with Russia about, what we are going to give our Russian partners and what Ukraine is ready for to get the cheap gas,” Yatseniuk said from the parliament rostrum. “As for the staff rotation in the government we want the president to say if he is going to declare a state of emergency in Ukraine since in the country the military junta is being created.”
Now the matter depends on the president. Using the football terminology, the ball is in his court. “The president has the right to appoint meetings and he has his schedule. I think Yanukovych does not avoid the opposition and is ready for a wide dialog,” Mykhailo Chechetov’s reply to The Day was more than evasive.
“The leaders of the opposition want to come to Yanukovych and ask him a straight question: ‘Are you going to fulfill the demands of the PACE resolution or you just want to deceive Merkel, Sarkozy, Komorovsky, and Clinton!” the member of BYuT Andrii Pavlovsky expressed his indignation while talking to The Day. “If he is going to keep his promises, the opposition will demand a plan of specific actions. For example, he will release Lutsenko, then Tymoshenko, and then Ivashchenko.”
Meanwhile, the Verkhovna Rada approved in the first reading the initiative of the Council Cabinet allowing officials to stay at the government service until they are 65 years old. It should be noted that Mykola Azarov is going to be 65 on December 17, 2012.
This week the MPs are also supposed to choose the Chair of the Committee for Freedom of Speech and Information. The committee supported the idea to appoint Yurii Stets from the fraction NU-NS. Will the fraction of BYuT support their opposition colleague or will it pose again? The members of BYuT assure that they have the whole bench: Abdulov, Ukolov, and Kondratiuk. However, in all appearance they will have to climbdown and support Stets.
The question of choosing the new ombudsman at the Verkhovna Rada has been postponed till mid-March. Now two candidates are being discussed: Nina Karpachova and Yevhenii Zakharov. As The Day has previously written, head of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union Zakharov was nominated by the opposition, as for Karpachova, not everything is clear about her candidature. In a word, now they have the even chances.
